The picture of my text is, of course, in its broad outlines, very
clear and intelligible, but there may be a little difficulty as to
the precise force of the language. The obscurity of it is in some
degree reflected in the margin of our Bibles; so, perhaps, you will
permit one word of an expository nature. The description of the
flock, 'Because they fainted and were scattered abroad,' is couched
in the original in a couple of words, one of which means properly
'torn' or 'fainting,' according as one or other of two readings of
the text is adopted, and the other means 'lying down.' Now, the
former of these gives a very pathetic picture if we apply it to the
individuals that made up the flock. We have then the image of the
poor sheep that has lost its way, struggling through briars and
thorns, getting out of them with its fleece all torn and hanging in
strips dangling at its heels, or of it as lacerated by the beasts of
the field to whom it is a prey. If we take the metaphor, as seems
more probably to be intended, as applying not so much to the
individuals as to the flock, then it comes to mean 'torn asunder,'
'thrown apart,' and gives us the notion of anarchic confusion into
which the flock comes if there be no shepherd to lead it. Then the
other word, which our Bible translates 'were scattered abroad,'
seems to mean more properly 'lying down,' and it gives the idea of
the poor, wearied creature, after all its struggles and wanderings,
utterly beaten and dejected, having lost its way, at its wits' end
and resourceless, flinging itself down there in despair, and panting
its timid life out anywhere where it finds itself. So it comes to be
a picture of the utter weariness and hopelessness of all men's
efforts apart from that Guide and Shepherd, who alone can lead them
in the way. And then both of these miserable states, the laceration
if you take the one explanation, the disintegration and casting
apart if you take the other, the weariness and exhaustion, are
traced to their source, they are 'as sheep having no shepherd.' He
has gone, and so all this comes. With this explanation we may take
the points of view that are thus suggested simply as they lie before
us.
First of all, notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, the
outward was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of the
inward; how the thing that He saw in a man was not the external
accidents of circumstance or position, for His true, clear gaze and
His loving, wise heart went straight to the essence of the matter,
and dealt with the man not according to what he might happen to be
in the categories of earth, but to what he was in the categories of
heaven. All the same to Him whether it was some poor harlot, or a
rabbi; all the same to Him whether it was Pilate on the judgment-seat,
or the penitent thief hanging at His side. These gauds and shows were
nothing; sheer away He cut them all, and went down to the hidden heart
of the man, and He allocated and ranged them according to that.
Christian men and women, do you try to do the same thing, and to get
rid of all these superficial veils and curtains with which we drape
ourselves and attitudinise in the world, and to see men as Christ saw
them, both in regard to your judgment of them, and in regard to your
judgment of yourselves? 'I am a scholar and a wise man; a great thinker;
a rich merchant; a man of rising importance and influence.' Very well;
what does that matter? 'I am ignorant or a pauper'; be it so. Let us
get below all that. The one question worth asking and worth answering
is, 'How am I affected towards Him?' There are many temporary and
local principles of arrangement and order among men; but they will
all vanish some day, and there will be one regulating and arranging
principle, and it is this: 'Do I love God in Jesus Christ, or do I
not?' Oh! for myself, for yourself, and for all our outlook towards
others, let us not forget that the inmost, deepest, hidden man of the
heart is the man, and that all else is naught, and that its whole
character is absolutely determined by its relation to Jesus Christ.
But this is somewhat aside from my main purpose, which is rather
briefly to expand the various phases which, as I have already
suggested, are included in such an emblem. The first of them is
this: Try to think for yourselves of the condition of humanity as
apart from Christ--shepherdless. That old metaphor of a shepherd
which comes out of the Old Testament is there sometimes used to
indicate a prophet, and sometimes to indicate a king. I suppose we
may put both of these uses together, as far as our present purposes
are concerned; and this is what I want to insist upon. I dare say
some people here will think it is very old-fashioned, very narrow in
these broad and liberal days; but what I would say is this, that
unless Jesus Christ is both Guide and Teacher, we have neither guide
nor teacher but are shepherdless without Him. There are plenty of
rulers. There was no lack of other authority in the days of His
flesh. There were crowds of rabbis, guides, and directors. The life
of the nation was throttled by the authorities that had planted
themselves upon its back, and yet Christ saw that there were none of
those who were fit for the work, or afforded the adequate guidance.
And so it is, now and always. There have been hosts of men who have
sought to impose their authority upon an era. Where is there one
that has swayed passion, that has ruled hearts, that has impressed
his own image on the will, that has made obedience an honour, and
absolute, abject devotion to his command a very patent of nobility?
Here, and nowhere beside. Besides that Christ there is no ruler
amongst men who can come to them and say to his servant, 'Go,' and
he goeth, and to this man, 'Do this,' and he doeth it. Obedience to
any besides is treason against the dignity of our own nature;
disobedience to Him is both treason against our nature and blasphemy
against God. 'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art the
everlasting Son of the Father.' _There_ is the deepest reason
for His rule.
And as for 'teacher,' whom are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be
these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding,
ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by
ever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that
swallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ
or nobody. Aaron dies upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; the
teachers, the leaders, the guides, the under-shepherds, pass away
one by one; and if this Christ be but a Man and a Teacher, He too
will pass away. Shall I be thought very blind to the signs of the
times if I say that I see no sign of His dominion being exhausted,
of His influence being diminished, of His guidance being capable of
being dispensed with? You may say, 'Oh, we do not want any teacher
or guide; we do not want a shepherd.' I am not going to enter upon
that question now at all, except just to say this, that the instincts
of humanity rise up in contradiction, as it seems to me, of that cold
and cheerless creed, and that we have this fact staring us in the
face, that men are made capable of a devotion and submission the
most passionate, the most absolute, the most mighty force in their
lives, to human guides and ensamples, and that it is all wasted unless
there be somewhere a Man, our Brother, who shall come to us and say,
'All that ever went before Me are thieves and robbers; I am the Good
Shepherd; follow Me, and ye shall not walk in darkness,' 'He saw the
multitudes as sheep having no shepherd.'
Still further, take that other phase of the metaphor which, as I
suggested, the text includes, namely, the idea of disintegration,
the rending apart of social ties and union, unless there be the
centre of unity in the shepherd of the flock. 'I will smite the
shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered,' says the old prophecy.
Of course, for what is there to hold them together unless it be
their guide and their director? So we are brought face to face with
this plain prosaic rendering of the metaphor--that but for the centre
of unity provided for mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ,
there is no satisfaction of the deep hunger for unity and society
with which in that case God would have cursed mankind. For whilst
there are many other bonds most true, most blessed, God-given, and
mighty, such as that of the sacred unity of the family, and that of
the nation and many others of which we need not speak, yet all these
are constantly being disintegrated by the unresting waves of that
gnawing sea of selfishness, if I may so say, which, like the waters
upon our eastern coasts, eats and eats for ever at the base of the
cliffs, so that society in all its forms, whether it be built upon
identity of opinion, which is perhaps the shabbiest bond of all, or
whether it be built upon purposes of mutual action, which is a great
deal better, or whether it be built upon hatred of other people,
which is the modern form of patriotism, or whether it be built upon
the domestic affections, which are the purest and highest of all--all
the other bonds of society, such as creeds, schools, nations,
associations, leagues, families, denominations, all go sooner or
later. The base is eaten out of them, because every man that belongs
to them has in him that tyrannous, dominant self, which is ever
seeking to assert its own supremacy. Here is Babel, with its
half-finished tower, built on slime; and there is Pentecost, with
its great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the unifying; here
the disintegration, there the power that draws them all together.
'They were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd,' and one
looks out over the world and sees great tracts of country and long
dismal generations of time, in which the very thought of unity and
charity and human bonds knitting men together has faded from the
consciousness of the race, and then one turns to blessed, sweet,
simple words that say, 'there shall be one flock and one shepherd,'
and 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.'
Drawing thus, He will draw them into the eternal, mighty bond of
union that shall never be broken, and is all the more precious and
all the more true because it is not a unity like the vulgar unities
that express themselves in external associations. You know, of
course or if you do not know it will be a good thing that you should
know, that that verse in John's Gospel which I have quoted has been
terribly mangled by a little slip of our translators. Christ said,
'Other sheep I must bring which are not of this fold,' the fold
being the external unity of the Jewish church--an enclosure made of
hurdles that you can stick in the ground. 'I shall bring them,' says
He, 'and there shall be one'--(not, as our Bible says, 'fold,'--but
something far better)--'there shall be one flock'; which becomes a
unity not by wattling round about it on the outside, but by a
shepherd standing in the middle. 'There shall be one flock and one
shepherd'--a unity which is neither the destruction of the variety of
the churches, nor the crushing of men, nationalities, and types of
character all down into one dead level beneath the heel of a conqueror,
but the unity which subsists in the many operations of the one Spirit,
and is expressed by all the forms of the one inspired grace.
Then passing by altogether the other idea which I said was only
doubtfully suggested by the words--namely, that of laceration and
wounding--let me say a word about the last of the aspects of
humanity when Christless, which is set forth in this text, and that
is, the dejected weariness arising from the fruitless wanderings
wherewith men are cursed. As a verse in the Book of Proverbs puts
it, 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because
they know not how to go to the city.' Putting aside the metaphor,
the plain truth which it embodies is just this, that there is in all
men's souls a deep longing after peace and rest, after goodness and
beauty and truth, and that all the strenuous efforts to satisfy
these longings, either by social reforms or by individual culture
and discipline, are pathetically vain and profitless, because there
is none to guide them. The sheep go wandering in any direction, and
with no goal; and wherever one has jumped, a dozen others will go
after him, and so they are wearied out long before the day's journey
is ended, and they never reach the goal. Put that into less vivid,
and, therefore, as people generally suppose, more accurate,
language, and it is a statement of the universal law of human
history that, after any epoch of great aspirations and strong
excitement of the noblest parts of human nature, there has always
come a reaction of corruption and a collapse from weariness. What
did 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' end in? A guillotine. What do
all similar epochs end in, when they do not take the Christ to march
ahead of them? An utter disgust and disillusion, and a despair of
all progress. That is why wild revolutionists in their youth are
always obstinate Conservatives in their old age. The wandering sheep
are footsore, and they fling themselves down by the wayside. That is
why heathenism presents to us the aspect that it does. There is
nothing about it that seems to me more tragical than the weary
languor that besets it. Do you ever think of the depth of pathetic,
tragic meaning that there is in that verse in one of the Psalms,
'Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death'? There they
sit, because there is no hope in rising and moving. They would have
to grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like the
Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the
true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays
hold upon them all--torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or
progress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated,
lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless--away from Christ. So He
thought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to see, as
Christ saw, the condition of humanity and our own apart from Him.
II. And now let me say a word in the next place as to the second
movement of His mind and heart here. He teaches us not only how to
think of men, but how that sight should touch us.
'He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitude'--with
the eye of a god, I was going to say, and the heart of a man. Pity
belongs to the idea of divinity; compassion belongs to the idea of
divinity incarnate; and the motion that passed across His heart is the
motion that I would seek may pass, with its sweet and healing breath,
across yours and mine. The right emotion for a Christian looking on
the Christless crowds is pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, not
curiosity; pity, not indifference. How many of us walk the streets of
the towns in which our lot is cast, and never know one touch of that
emotion, when we look at these people here in England torn, and anarchic,
and wearied, and shepherdless, within sound of our psalm-singing in
our chapels? Why, on any Sunday there are thousands of men and women
standing about the streets who, we may be sure, have not seen the
inside of a church or a chapel since they were married, and that not
one in five hundred of all the good people that are going with their
prayer-books and hymn-books to church and chapel ever think anything
about them as they pass them by; and some of them, perhaps, if they
come to any especially disreputable one, will gather up their skirts
and keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of it. But
Jesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great deal nearer
to the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was the leprous
whiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous Pharisee. He
had neither aversion, nor anger, nor indifference.
And, if I might venture to touch upon another matter, compassion and
not curiosity is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtful
and cultivated amongst our congregations. I have just said that the
appropriate Christian feeling in contemplating the state of the sheep
without the Shepherd is compassion, not curiosity. That reminder is
particularly needful in view of the prominence to-day of investigations
into the new science of Comparative Religion. I speak with most
unfeigned respect of it and of its teachers, and gratefully hail the
wonderful light that it is casting upon ideas underlying the strange
and often savage and obscene rites of heathenism; but it has a side of
danger in it against which I would warn you all, especially young,
reading men and women. The time has not yet come when we can afford to
let such investigations be our principal occupation in the face of
heathenism. If idolatry was dead we could afford to do that, but it
is alive--the more's the pity; and it is not only a curious instance
of the workings of man's intelligence, and a great apocalypse of
earlier stages of society, but, besides that, it is a lie that is
deceiving and damning our brethren, and we have got to kill it first
and dissect it afterwards. So I say, do not only think of heathenism
in its various forms as a subject for speculation and analysis; as
much as you like of that, only do not let it drive out the other
thing, and after you have tried to understand it, then come back to
my text, 'He was moved with compassion.' And so pity, and neither
anger, nor aversion, nor curiosity, nor indifference is what I urge
as the Christian emotion.
III. Let us take this text as teaching us how Christ would have us
act, after such emotion built and based upon such a look.
It is perfectly legitimate, although it is by no means the highest
motive, to appeal to feeling as a stimulus to action. We have a
right to base our urging of Christian men and women to missionary
work either at home or abroad, upon the ground of the condition of
the men to whom the Gospel has to be carried. I know that if taken
alone it is a very inadequate motive. I believe that any failure
that may be manifest in the interest of Christian people in
missionary work is largely traceable to the blunder we have made in
dwelling on superficial motives more than we ought to have done, in
proportion to the degree in which we have dwelt on the deepest. We
have been gathering the surface-water instead of going right down to
the green sand, to which the artesian well must be sunk if the
stream is to come up without pumping or wasting. So I say that a
deeper reason than the sorrow and darkness of the heathen is--'the
love of Christ constraineth me'; but yet the first is a legitimate
one. Only remember this, that Bishop Butler taught us long ago, that
if you excite emotions which are intended to lead to action, and the
action does not follow, the excitation of the emotion without its
appropriate action makes the heart a great deal harder than it was
before. That is why it is playing with edged tools to speak so much
to our Christian audiences, as we sometimes hear done, about the
condition of the heathen as a stimulus to missionary work. If a man
does not respond and do something, some crust of callousness and
coldness comes over his own heart. You cannot indulge in the luxury
of emotion which you do not use to drive your spindles, without
doing yourselves harm. It is never intended to be blown off as waste
steam and allowed to vanish into the air. It is meant to be conserved
and guided, and to have something done with it. Therefore beware of
sentimental contemplation of the sad condition of the shepherdless
sheep which does not move you to do anything to help them.
One word more. Take my text as a guide to the form of action into
which we are to cast the emotions that should spring from this gaze
upon the world. I will only name three points. Christ opened His
mouth and spake to them, and taught them many things; Christ said to
His disciples, 'Pray ye the Lord of the harvest'; and Christ sent
out His apostles to preach the Kingdom. These three things in their
bearing upon us are--personal work, prayer, help to send forth
Christ's messengers. There is nothing like personal work for making
a man understand and feel the miseries of his fellows. Christian men
and women, it is your first business everywhere to proclaim the name
of Jesus Christ, and no prayers and no subscriptions absolve you
from that. In this army a man cannot buy himself off and send in a
substitute at the cost of an annual guinea. If Christ sent the
apostles, do you hold up the hands of the apostles' successors, and
so by God's grace you and I may help on the coming of that blessed
day when there shall be one flock and one Shepherd, and when 'the
Lamb that is in the midst of the throne'--for the Shepherd is
Himself a lamb--'shall feed them and lead them, and God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes.'